Thursday, January 4, 2018

בת פרעה

It's Bisyah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (דברי הימים א ד:י"ח)I would love to meet the Rebbe or Morah with the courage to teach it that way. Of all the moros and rebbeim my kids have had, I may be able to count on one ... finger.

However, the first comment by Anonymous offers a plausible לימוד זכות. Perhaps Bisyah is an Egyptian form of the name and once she converted, it became Basyah which is more of a Hebrew form. The problem is, was this really her given name? It's hard to imagine פרעה would name his daughter such. It's more likely this was a name given to her only after she converted.

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Chill. First of all, I was taught "Bisya" in elementary school, and I'm sure others were as well.In an effort to be "melamed zechus" on the many who do say "Basya": perhaps "Basya" is the Hebrew translation of "Bisya", which is an Egyptian name. According to the many medrashim that this woman in fact converted to Judaism later in life, we can now use her real, Jewish name.

Ha ha! That's pretty funny.It reminds me of a story a friend told me about his wife, who, when she was in seminary, got annoyed at her teacher calling her RO-chel and insisted her name was ra-CHEIL. The teacher responded, "Well, in the Torah it's RO-chel."

If I can remember correctly way back to elementary school... I think I was aware of both Basya as well as Bisya (actually at the time it would have been Batya and Bitya). It was soething along the lines of being initially told Batya but then also being aware that in Divrei haYamim it is Bitya, etc.

My current impression is that it is basically the same name, that the difference is due to phonetics or something along the lines of smichut - just as Yehoshua bin Nun and not ben Nun, and Binyamin as opposed to Benyamin.

As far as that ra-CHEIL vs. RO-chel ridiculousness, I am reminded of the anglicized version of the name. Rachel is probably the most common English spelling, but Rachael isn't uncommon - people erroneously spelling it like Michael and Israel, as if the end of the name is a shem haSHEM.

Very funny. I do know how many kids I have, thank you. I originally wrote this post in 2010 but I'm not sure when I might have added that line. What I am unsure about is the grand tally of all morahs/rebbeim who have taught my kids. I think I struck out again this year.